Cinnamon Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookie Bars

I love that my nieces and nephews are also some of my kids best friends. The other day, my niece was over all day, and it was fun watching how the girls entertained themselves.

They are very big on Monster High Dolls. Have you seen these? They are dang cute, but I don’t recommend them for little girls, because there are lots of little pieces, and they tend to come apart easily. For the girls in double-digits, they are perfect. Both girls dragged their entire (substantial) collections out to the trampoline, and with yard lights and head lamps, they spent hours deep in imagination land.

After a trip to Grandma’s to pick apricots, and a trip to Costco to buy a new vacuum, these girls continued to find ways to entertain themselves. First, they did their hair and makeup. Then, they used Hippie Chick’s white board easel to announce that they would be giving makeovers to any willing party.

As it turned out, our oldest son The Lizard and a visiting friend both took advantage of the makeovers. I thought it was sweet of them to let the girls put makeup on their faces and paint their fingernails.

The boys reward for being patient guinea pigs was cookies. That fact was settled on in the early stages of negotiations.

The girls and I had fun figuring out what kind of cookie we could make with the ingredients we had on hand. I found a half bag of chocolate chips and a half bag of cinnamon chips, and The Hippie Chick suggested oatmeal cookies, and voila! A heavenly concoction was born.

They did all the work, and I sat on the other side of the counter and… uh… supervised. Yep. Being a supervisor is the best job ever.

We decided to just bake these up as bars, and we used a quarter sheet pan. (These pans are about 9.5″ x 13″.) We baked for about 20 minutes. They did turn out a touch gooey, which frankly doesn’t bother me at all, but those squeemish about eggs might want a little more baking time, like say 25-30 minutes. I also gave them a good 30 minutes to cool before cutting. I would say that is the minimum amount of cooling time, as they were almost ready to cut at that point.

Of course, you could also make a slightly thinner bar by using less of the dough or a larger baking sheet. You could also just drop them like regular cookies, and give them 8-10 minutes to bake.

I like the idea of the bars, because it leaves you 20-30 minutes of free time to do the really important stuff.